After a finance trusteeship relationship is established, the main account takes over the orders, bills, invoices, and discounts of its linked accounts. This topic describes what changes for a linked account and the usage notes that apply to finance trusteeship.
Changes to linked accounts under finance trusteeship
After a finance trusteeship relationship is established:
The main account pays for the subscription orders and the pay-as-you-go bills that a linked account generates while the relationship is in effect.
Resource suspension/resumption in a linked account depends only on the available balance of the trusteeship main account. When the available balance of the main account falls below zero, all linked accounts enter the suspended state.
Every order and every bill of a linked account is automatically charged to the main account, and the main account manages them in a unified manner.
Every invoice of a linked account is automatically charged to the main account, and the main account issues the invoices in a unified manner.
A linked account uses the discounts and offers of the main account.
The available balance in the account of a linked account is not transferred when the finance trusteeship relationship is established. The linked account can still use the funds in its own account to pay the bills that were due before the trusteeship was established.
The fees of a trusteeship linked account are not included in cost allocation. That is, no cost billing is provided for the fees of a linked account, and all bills belong to the main account.
Finance trusteeship usage notes
Low-balance alerts and spending alerts are no longer sent to a linked account. Alert messages are sent to the main account, based on the spending and the available balance of the main account.
When a trusteeship linked account subscribes to a service and is billed, the offers and discounts of the main account apply. AliTelecom is an exception: AliTelecom still uses the offers of the linked account itself.
After the finance trusteeship association takes effect, trusteeship bills are charged to the trusteeship main account only from the next billing cycle. For example, for a product that is settled by day, if the main account and a linked account establish the trusteeship or change it to trusteeship on a given day, the daily bill for that day is still charged to the linked account or to the original main account, and only the daily bill for the following day is charged to the new trusteeship main account, with the offers taken from the main account. The same logic applies to products whose billing cycle is hourly, per minute, weekly, or monthly.
The coupons of a linked account remain dedicated to that linked account and can be used only when that linked account incurs fees. Other accounts cannot use them.
After you set the settlement relationship of a linked account to finance trusteeship, or change it to finance trusteeship, the effective time of the trusteeship differs depending on whether the linked account has unsettled bills. You can view the bills whose status is Unsettled by filtering bills by payment status on the Billing Details page.
If unsettled bills exist, the full amount of the consumption in the current billing cycle for the products whose bills have already been generated and remain unsettled is still paid by the linked account, or by the trusteeship main account from before the relationship was changed. The consumption of the next billing cycle is paid by the trusteeship main account that results from the new or changed relationship.
If no unsettled bill exists, the change takes effect directly in the current billing cycle that contains the time of the change. Bills generated before the effective time are still paid by the linked account, or by the trusteeship main account from before the relationship was changed. Bills generated at or after the effective time are all paid by the trusteeship main account that results from the new or changed relationship.
When the main account and a linked account are associated or disassociated, if the linked account originally has valid resources, the validity period of the resources is migrated: after association the owner becomes the main account, and after disassociation the owner becomes the linked account. The resources are available only for their remaining validity period. Based on the business rules, these resources have no financial value, so changing the configuration to a lower specification during the validity period produces no refund, and a refund cannot be processed.
Finance trusteeship requires that the accounts of a customer belong to the same enterprise. Therefore, after the trusteeship relationship is established, changes to the identity verification of the accounts are no longer allowed. If you do need to change the identity verification of an account, remove the trusteeship relationship first and then perform the change.
A maximum of 300 linked accounts can be associated under a finance trusteeship.